Month: August 2017

The Congressional Dietary Supplement Caucus, an officially-recognized Congressional Membership Organization, operates as an in-house mouthpiece for the dietary supplement industry. Both the caucus and the rules allowing it should be reformed to prohibit this.

A new article in Business Insider challenges the major narrative promoted by the supplement industry - that supplements are safe, effective, natural, and actually in the bottle. If we are lucky, this may mark a the start of a sea change in how Americans see supplements.

"Mary is really bitchy today; she must be on the rag." Comments like this are all too common, and are misguided. In her new book, Robyn Stein DeLuca dispels the myths about how hormones affect women's moods and mental health, myths that have contributed to unequal treatment of women. Junk science supported the myths; good science debunks them.

By definition, alternative medicine has not been shown to be effective or has been shown to be ineffective. Thus, alternative medicine is ineffective against cancer and can best be represented as either no treatment at all or potentially harmful treatment. It is thus not surprising that cancer patients who choose alternative medicine have a higher risk of dying from their cancer. A...

While leg cramps won't kill you, they can make you miserable when you are trying to sleep. There's not much evidence for effective treatments, and there are far more proposed treatments than there is evidence.

A new article looked at the effect of playing video games on the brain. Its results confirm what was previously suspected from prior research. First, it is another demonstration of use-dependent plasticity in the brain. Further, it supports a direct relationship between the types of activity in which people engage and increases or decreases in the respective parts of the brain. And...

A novel about a doctor who raped a minor and is being investigated by his state medical board provides behind-the-scene insights into the workings of medical boards. It helps explain why these boards are so often ineffective, why medical malfeasance so often leads to a token disciplinary action rather than to loss of license.

In March, it was widely reported that a young woman named Jade Erick had died suddenly of a hypersensitivity reaction while undergoing an infusion of intravenous curcumin ordered by a naturopath named Kim Kelly to treat her eczema. The FDA investigated and found egregious problems with the injectable curcumin used. This tragic incident thus serves to demonstrate how dangerous a combination naturopaths...

So-called “right-to-try” is a cruel sham that holds out the false hope of survival to terminally ill patients and their families. In return, all they have to give up is patient protections and agree to pay to be guinea pigs to test a drug company’s product. The product of an ideology that uses the terminally ill as shields to hide the ideological...